An upcom­ing theme of Friends Jour­nal is one I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ed in. It’s called “Reimag­in­ing the Quak­er Ecosys­tem” and address­es count­less con­ver­sa­tions I think many of us have had over the years. Here’s the description:

Many of our tra­di­tion­al decision-making struc­tures are under tremen­dous stress these days. There are few nom­i­nat­ing com­mit­tees that don’t bemoan the dif­fi­cul­ties find­ing vol­un­teer lead­er­ship. In the face of this, a wave of ques­tion­ing and cre­ativ­i­ty is emerg­ing as Friends rein­vent and regen­er­ate Quak­er struc­tures. Pre­vi­ous­ly unasked ques­tions about pow­er and decision-making mod­els are on the agen­da again.

I think this begs the ques­tion of the whole why and how of our orga­niz­ing as a reli­gious soci­ety. One of the most read posts on my blog in 2003 was a based on a review of a book by Robert E. Web­ber called The Younger Evan­gel­i­cals. Web­ber was talk­ing about main­stream Evan­gel­i­cals, who he divid­ed into three gen­er­a­tional phases,

• Tra­di­tion­al Evan­gel­i­cals 1950 – 1975
• Prag­mat­ic Evan­gel­i­cals 1975 – 2000
• Younger Evan­gel­i­cals 2000-

I was work­ing at Friends Gen­er­al Con­fer­ence back in 2003 and Webber’s descrip­tions felt sur­pris­ing­ly famil­iar despite the very dif­fer­ent con­text of lib­er­al Quakerism.

Take for exam­ple youth min­istry: Web­ber says Prag­mat­ic Evan­gel­i­cals tend to pre­fer “out­reach pro­grams and week­end fun retreats,” which is what the even­tu­al FGC Youth Min­istries Pro­gram most­ly mor­phed into (before going into per­ma­nent hia­tus). Web­ber sug­gests that the Younger Evan­gel­i­cals cohort sought “prayer, Bible study, wor­ship, social action” and sure enough many pro­gres­sive spir­i­tu­al types in Philly left meet­ing­hous­es for the alter­na­tive Cir­cle of Hope church. Quak­erism lost a lot of momen­tum at that time (Bet­sy Blake see also: Bet­sy Blake’s account). It took the cre­ation of a whole new orga­ni­za­tion, Quak­er Vol­un­tary Ser­vice, to get a live­ly and sus­tain­able youth min­istries run­ning (you can read QVS’s Ross Hennesy’s jour­ney from the 2013 FJ to see Webber’s chart come to life).

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that I think many Quak­er orgs are stuck in a rut try­ing every­thing they can to make the Prag­mat­ic Evan­gel­i­cal mod­el work. There’s a hope that just one more reor­ga­ni­za­tion will solve their sys­temic longterm prob­lems — new peo­ple will come into com­mit­tee ser­vice, meet­ing­hous­es will start fill­ing, etc. But the more we try to hold onto the old frame­work, the more cre­ative ener­gy dis­si­pates and Friends get lost or leave.

My per­son­al hunch is that struc­ture (almost) doesn’t mat­ter. What we need is a shift in atten­tion. How can we back up and ask the big ques­tions: Why are we here? What is our prophet­ic role and how do we encour­age and sup­port that in our mem­bers? How do we care for our church com­mu­ni­ty and still reach beyond the meet­ing­house walls to serve as heal­ers in the world?

A few years ago I dropped in on part of my year­ly meet­ing ses­sions. In one room, mostly-older mem­bers were revis­ing some arcane sub­sec­tion of Faith and Prac­tice while across the hall mostly-younger mem­bers were express­ing heart­break about a badly-decided pol­i­cy on trans youth. The dis­con­nect between the spir­it in the rooms was beyond obvious.

I think we need to be able to stop and give atten­tion to direct lead­ings of need­ed min­istry. I often return to the Good Samar­i­tan sto­ry. In my mind’s eye the Levite is the Friend who can’t stop because they’re late for a com­mit­tee meet­ing. If we could fig­ure out a way to get more Friends to piv­ot into Good Samar­i­tan mode, I sus­pect we’d find new life in our reli­gious soci­ety. Peren­ni­al ques­tions would transform.

Signs of new life are abun­dant but uneven­ly dis­trib­uted. How do you imag­ine the ecosys­tem in 10, 20, or 50 years? Sub­mis­sion due date 3/6 offi­cial­ly though we may have a chance to review lat­er pieces.

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